YouTube's backend is quite neat, as you say it is highly distributed and uses replication to get videos to the various servers, it sort of emulates how multicast works and the replication algorithms are really cleaver also.
YouTube uses an anycast IP address so you always get the the closest server. Some bigger ISPs co-locate YouTube servers so they are really close to the end user.
The infrastructure behind YouTube is awesome, the company is slimy filth.
YouTube's backend is quite neat, as you say it is highly distributed and uses replication to get videos to the various servers, it sort of emulates how multicast works and the replication algorithms are really cleaver also.
YouTube uses an anycast IP address so you always get the the closest server. Some bigger ISPs co-locate YouTube servers so they are really close to the end user.
The infrastructure behind YouTube is awesome, the company is slimy filth.